Chester Bennington and Kurt Cobain. Although I discovered their songs years after their death.

I see. Thanks for the link.

How are they getting around it? I thought Australia implemented some sort of ID verification? And given that social media platforms notoriously refuse to run on VPNs, how are the teenagers bypassing the checks? Is everyone there using their parent’s ID or something?!

I don’t think there is any E2EE between a JMP number and an iPhone. Cheogram offers E2EE, but I think it is just between Cheogram clients. Although I have never used iMessage (or iOS), I believe it is E2EE between iMessage clients, so if all your family members are on iMessage, then may be staying on that will offer you better security compared to Cheogram.

That said, I know GrapheneOS has been working on RCS (although I do not use it). I have seen some of these RCS updates on their changelog, and some users report that it works too (see https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/6173 for example). So, may be you can ask your family members to turn RCS on, and use it to securely communicate between GrapheneOS and iOS?!

Bruh I can’t even do college. Withdrew like a month in… that’s how depressed I was.

I am sorry for that. I was very depressed in college too, but somehow managed to graduate.

There is no future for me.

That is not true. Given the very limited inputs we have been fed, we may conclude that we do not have any future. But, I think there are possibilities that we have just not envisioned that might open up.

Either I manage to inherit family bussiness (part of it anyways) and just manage it well and not bankrupt it or I go wage slavery like everyone else…

About the “wage slavery like everyone else”, do you have any hopes and dreams that you want to work towards? If you do, go for them. If not, it’s okay doing a normal job too. Often times, in life, we do not get what we want. If you have the resources (time and energy) to try and acheive your dreams, definitely go for it. But, if you do not, it is okay to just be normal and do a normal job. Not everyone has the fortune to rise to the top.

I myself work at a job that I always tried to avoid. I knew I’d be good at this job, but I did not want to do it, because I wanted to do something more interesting. Due to several factors, I wasn’t able to go after what I wanted, and instead have come to terms with my current job. I just keep telling myself I will do the stuff I wanted after I have achieved financial stability thanks to this job (may be in my 40s, I dunno).

I don’t know how to even do college without family support and depression.

Can you get to a therapist? They can help you a bit with depression. Regarding family support, again, I am sorry for what you are going through. I too didn’t have proper family support when I was in college (along with severe depression), and it was really hard to get through everything. I managed to graduate, move away, and be alone; which helped a bit with my mental state.

Honestly at this point, I might just give up on moral codes… become a corrupt politician…

I don’t think becoming “a corrupt politician” is as easy. :D

You either die young, or you live long enough to become a shitty person because the cruelty of the world will destroy your conscience…

No offense, man, but this is complete bullshit. Quotes like this are better suited for movies. Reality, morality and humanity are often more complicated. And death is not an answer, because it offers you nothing that life doesn’t.

Becoming a shitty person isn’t easy, and I do not think it is a flick of a switch.

Cruelty of the world doesn’t need to get to you. You do not need to lose your morality to adhere to some of the negativities in this world. Sure, you do what you need to do to survive; sometimes, it may be unethical (try to avoid if you can), but it doesn’t make you immoral altogether.

Brother, I’ve pondered about the thought of ending it all, and I have realized that it isn’t the solution. Not because you have so much to live for, but because death has nothing that life cannot offer. Death is the absolute negation of everything, it is absolute nothingness. There are no pros and cons when it comes to absolute nothingness.

You sound like a person in his college years. My suggestion, for now, do what you must, stay in college, and study. Once you are out of college, try and get a job (this might take really long and might a depressing period, given the current job market), and move the fuck out.

I personally do not use long press power for flashlight, but your requirement got me curious, and I tried to replicate it.

This is doable, but seems to require more permissions. I downloaded KeyMapper from F-Droid (https://f-droid.org/packages/io.github.sds100.keymapper/), and added a new key map with Long press Power trigger and Toggle flashlight action. However, this application requires Accessibility permissions (because you are overriding system maps ig), Camera (for flashlight), Network (I think it sends an adb command via wireless debugging to do the toggle) and unrestricted battery usage.

As for the speed data, from a surface level search, I found these two apps:

1. NetUpDown (https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.by_syk.netupdown): This shows a floating window (instead of the notifications bar) with the network speed.

2. Traffic Light (https://f-droid.org/packages/com.leekleak.trafficlight/): This displays the network speed as a notification, but shows the incorrect data for me for some reason.

Theoretically, it should be possible to just mash the functionality (/code) of these two to get what you want (thanks to open source).

I thought it was, but now that I looked into it, it is not. I know that you can use firewall apps to restrict internet access (which I hinted in my original answer), but now that I checked my LineageOS phone again, I see some toggles under Settings → Apps → YourApp → Mobile data usage. I am not sure how this differs from the GOS implementation (apart from the UX), but you do have the toggle.

I came to GrapheneOS for privacy and security, but stayed for the features.

1. Per application network toggle: I found this incredibly useful in cases where the application is fully functional without internet, yet still asks for internet permission, and I do not want it to phone home (e.g. Google Photos). It is helpful for when you are using a VPN, and do not want the slot to be taken by an application like NetGuard. Although, I believe you can replicate this functionality with (Split Tunneling) + (Block connections without VPN).

2. Storage Scopes: This is a another highly useful feature. Say you took a bunch of pictures on a trip, and want to show the pictures to a friend. Normally, you’d fear them snooping around pictures that you don’t want to show them. However, with GrapheneOS, you can just download a separate Gallery application, only expose the photos (or the photo directory) that you want to show via Storage Scopes, pin the application, and safely hand the phone over to them.

I found this feature very helpful when shortlisting ~10 photos from a gallery of 500 photos. I downloaded PhotoSwooper (which lets you keep/delete photos by swiping right/left) from F-Droid, exposed the 500 photos directory to it, and started swiping. I iterated this a couple of times, and got my perfect 10.

3. Contact Scopes: This is for the cases when you don’t want to expose your contacts to the application for whatever reason (e.g. you don’t want them to graph your connections or you just want to protect the privacy of your friends). You can just selectively share contact(s) instead of handing your entire phonebook to the application.

4. Sandboxed Google Play: Some applications require the extremely invasive Google Play Services (because it operates with elevated system-level privileges). However, with GrapheneOS, you can just install the sandboxed play services, which acts as a regular user level application. You can then revoke network access within Sandboxed Google Play Services, and use your play services dependant application as usual.

So, basically, if you can afford it, go for GrapheneOS. I wanted privacy and security; but now that I tried GrapheneOS’s features, a lot of these are now nonnegotiable to me.

And why would you trust your own ISP more than reputable VPNs?

Sure, this statement is very valid for (free) VPNs which are not reputable, and act as data mines instead of providing true privacy; but your statement reads very much like we do not need VPNs at all.

ISPs know what sites you are visiting and when, and they are ready to comply with the government. Also, we have acts like Online Safety Act (UK), which incentivizes more data collection. Combine that with age verification on every site, and you are basically giving away your browsing history.

I agree that a VPN alone is not going to protect you, and you need to authenticate less into websites, and clear your cookies after every browser session (basically good OpSec). However, I also think that reputable providers like Mullvad and Proton are a must.

Try using an LLM.

I tried to timebox myself with a Python OCR solution, but ended up spending way more time than I should’ve, without ever arriving at a good solution.

I then tried using Qwen 235B via Brave’s Leo AI, and got some okay results (I think you’ll have better luck with commercial AI models; I just don’t have an account with them atm)

What does the PDF look like? Can you not OCR it into something like a CSV, and import it in Excel?